This New Zealand ad for Xenical has convinced me. I’m much, much better off being fat than being skinny.
Description belowa
Incidentally, I can tie my own shoes. And while the woman at the end of the ad says she can’t — unless she has a disability other than being fat, she can, too.
(Via Jezebel)
- For the YouTube impaired, a thin woman wanders through a landscape of Felliniesque horrors — trench warfare, bleeding knives, walking around naked in the winter — talking about how she’d like to live life unafraid, but — surprise — she’s a fat woman who’d just like to tie her own shoes. [↩]
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I’m about the same size as that woman, though not as pretty, and (when my vertigo is not playing up) I can certainly tie my own shoes. However, she has cleverly avoided the whole issue by wearing slip-on shoes without laces, so I’m not sure why she needs to go nursing in the trenches of WWI.
Jesus that was fucking weird. And offensive. And I’m a skinny dude!
And what a rocking tagline for the campaign. “Lose weight. Gain life.” Weight and life are antiparticles; your continued chubby existence is in some fundamental and mystical way draining the life out of the universe.
But don’t worry! If you just take the magic pill and do as you’re told, you can get skinny and become a net contributor of life to the world! Yikes.
I’m not a violent man but I wish someone would punch these people in the face, a lot.
On the bright side, I hadn’t realized before that firing squads had a policy of not shooting fat people. Go team fat!
I’m sorry, but this is what happens when you view fatness as a temporary state which must be escaped to the promised land of thin. What do you think happens, that people’s fee fee’s get a bit hurt, people get a bit sensitive?
It can and does split your consciousness in this kind of way.
I can’t mock it or be offended, this is my experience, this is where I lived.
It’s one of the things that most upset me about being fat, especially when I was young. I felt like one distinct person on the inside which was reflected in my dream of thin and felt like I looked a brick out house on the outside.
It wasn’t so much that I was disappointed by my reflection as mystfied, how could that be me? I couldn’t relate.
Obviously the manufacturers have cottoned on to the fact that the desire for thinness has no ideological bounds and are targetting a more middle class/aspirant, dare I say, feminist market.
That’s about the wierdest TV commercial that I’ve ever seen.
I thought I had seen some weird stuff in my day, but this? I don’t even know where to begin, as to how utterly messed up this ad is. I also want to drop an anvil on the person, who decided to make it all dramatic with the fat woman saying she’d like to tie her shoes at the end.
I like a lot of the images & visual effects. It would be much, much better with no narrative or a different narrative. But its message isn’t really very effective. Who is the target audience? Fat people? They may be aware that they can tie their shoes. So if it isn’t fat people, is the point of the ad to make not-fat people pity/hate fat people? I have a hard time finding any other message
Yeah. I’m thin too, I guess, but I know damn well that the 500 km bike trip my definitely fat dad just did in 3 days (not to mention his regular Saturday routine trips of 90-100 km!) would probably kill me. (For a week, at least.) I believe that he also tied his own shoes before leaving. Arrrgh.
Plus, “lose weight, gain life” – in order to walk naked in the snow (eep! not fun!), stand in front of a firing squad (gain a short life, I guess), and have sex with strangers? I’m still trying to figure out who the ad is trying to reach, ’cause I don’t think it’s any of the fat people of my acquaintance.
Wouldn’t it be better to walk naked in the snow while fat than while skinny? A skinny person would be more vulnerable to frostbite and hypothermia. Walking through the desert now, there the advantage is to the skinny person.
@Dianne
Are you sure about the desert thing? Food and water are hard to come by in a sea of sand, and overweight people keep ample supplies in their fat, enough to keep them going a long time.
That being said, this sure is a messed up commercial. Not sure what were they thinking while making it.
Also, fat people can walk in the snow, have sex with strangers and get shot by a firing squad just as well as skinny people.
Good point, trog. Maybe a steamy rainforest where heat dissipation is difficult and water plentiful.
It is possible to have a beautiful life – and even tie one’s shoes – while fat! Why, it might even be possible to look good while being filmed in a moody, gothic landscape of strange scenes and events. Will wonders never cease?
Seriously. WTF? It’s like a class project where concepts are randomly matched with marketing topics – and it wouldn’t get an “A,” either.
I just think that is so sad. The ad itself is haunting with the foreign accent and beautiful images all coming to an end so abruptly with that lady so unhappy and unfulfilled because of her weight.
My interpretation would be that the advertisers are trying to tap in to what they believe is a stereotypical feeling for all fat people – that they’re missing out on how they think life is for thin people – and then accentuate it to make those fat people who dont feel that way think that maybe they should.
Isn’t that what advertising is all about? Making you want stuff you didn’t know you wanted? That, and getting people talking about the product through some controversy.
I guess the only way to see if it worked is to ask yourself – do you remember what the advert was for…?
You know why she can’t tie her shoes?
Look closely, she’s wearing freakin’ sandals.
So, what, this is an advertisement for lace-up shoes, cleverly (and pointlessly) disguised as an advertisement for nightmare-world thin-pills? That’s all I can make of it.